Dries Buytaert

My solar-powered website just crossed 500 days of uptime. It took the biggest snowstorm in nearly three years to put that streak at risk.

Winter storm Devin is burying the Northeast of the United States right now. There is over five inches of snow in Boston. Thousands of flights are cancelled, thousands more delayed.

I'm writing this from Schiphol airport in Amsterdam, my own flight home delayed. I can't see whether the solar panel on our roof deck is buried in snow or still catching a little light. All I can do is watch my solar dashboard from across the ocean and wait.

The dashboard says the battery is below 15%. It's still night in Boston and well below freezing. Even when the sun comes up, the charge controller won't recharge the battery if it is too cold.

When I started this experiment, I wrote that some downtime for some websites should be acceptable. I questioned why we obsess over 99.9% uptime for personal websites that don't need it.

The irony isn't lost on me: I wrote that downtime is fine, but I've refreshed the dashboard three times while writing this.

My website might go down, or it might stay up. Either way, I love that it will come back on its own whenever the sun breaks through. Both of us waiting for the weather to clear. Me at the airport and the Raspberry Pi under a snowy roof in Boston.